The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, a ’sequel’ to 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, has been given a release date. The game will ship to European retailers on 24 April.

The game itself is not a direct sequel to the original game, but more of a remake with new content on top of it. An improved version of Butcher Bay with redone graphics will be part of the package, along with an entirely new single-player campaign and several multiplayer modes. So, in essence, the game is more or less an episodic update to the original, although a direct sequel is reportedly in the works.

Atari also revealed that playable demos of the game will be coming to Xbox Live and PSN sometime next month. An official website for the game is also now online.

The original game was one of the most well received movie games of all time, with many players actually saying that it was far better than the movie it portrayed. You can make the decision yourself by picking the game up in the Xbox Classics range, but be warned that it’s not backwards compatible with the Xbox 360 (Apparently one of the reasons Microsoft wanted to do a remake of the original for the 360 is because they couldn’t make the Xbox version backwards compatible with the 360).